New Trier Township High School Winnetka is ranked 12th within Illinois. Students have the opportunity to take Advanced Placement® course work and exams. The AP® participation rate at New Trier Township High School Winnetka is 54 percent. The student body makeup is 52 percent male and 48 percent female, and the total minority enrollment is 15 percent. New Trier Township High School Winnetka is 1 of 2 high schools in the New Trier Twp Hsd 203.

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Rankings / Awards

This details how this school compares to others based on U.S. News ranking criteria.

Medal Awarded Gold
National Rank
#345
State Rank
#12
STEM Rank
#20
See Best High Schools in Illinois

Students / Teachers

These counts and percentages of students and teachers are from data reported by schools to the government.

This measures the proficiency on state exams among typically underperforming subgroups. The calculations by U.S. News were the second of two steps in determining which schools received at least a bronze medal.

Percentage of Disadvantaged Students Who Are Proficient 73.2
Percentage of Non-Disadvantaged Students Who Are Proficient 91.0
Gap Between Disadvantaged and Non-Disadvantaged Students -17.8
Gap Between School and State Among Disadvantaged Students 44.1
College-Ready Student Performance

High school students take AP® and IB exams to earn college credit and demonstrate success at college-level course work. U.S. News calculated a College Readiness Index based on exam participation rates and percentages of students passing at least one exam. The Index determined which types of medals (gold, silver or bronze) were awarded to top-performing schools.

Many U.S. higher educational institutions grant credits or advanced placement based on student performance on AP® exams. This shows this school’s student participation and performance on these exams if data were available. (N/A means no students participated.)

New Trier High School (also known as New Trier Township High School or NTHS) is a public four-year high school, with its main campus for sophomores through seniors located in Winnetka, Illinois, USA, and a freshman campus in Northfield, Illinois, with freshman classes and district administration. Founded in 1901, the school is known for its large spending per student, academic excellence, and its athletic, drama, visual arts, and music programs. New Trier’s primary campus in Winnetka is used by sophomores, juniors, and seniors, while the freshmen attend classes at the Northfield campus. The school serves the Chicago North Shore suburbs of Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, most of Northfield, and parts of Glenview and Northbrook.[11]
The school is named after the city of Trier, Germany, and New Trier’s logo depicts the Porta Nigra, symbol of that city; the athletic teams are known as the Trevians, which comes from the Treves, the French name for Trier.

New Trier Township High School was founded in 1901 in Winnetka, Illinois, with seventy-six students and seven faculty members.[citation needed] Chicago’s north shore communities had decided to build a school that would enable parents to educate their children without sending them to college preparatory schools on the Eastern seaboard.[citation needed]
The school has been marked by a series of firsts and other notable events. In 1912, New Trier became the first high school in America with an indoor swimming pool.[citation needed] During World War I, New Trier became a training ground for soldiers.[citation needed] A student fundraising drive at the time led to the purchase of a field ambulance.[citation needed] In 1928, New Trier began its advisory system, the first such in American public secondary education, in which each student meets with one faculty adviser and the same fellow advisory students every morning throughout his or her career.[citation needed] Students sold tax warrants door-to-door in the 1930s to keep the school operating as the flow of property tax funds dwindled in the Great Depression.[citation needed] During World War II, students sold bonds to finance both a B-17 (The Spirit of New Trier) and a B-29.[citation needed]
In the 1950s, New Trier became the first American high school with an educational, non-commercial FM broadcast license for a radiated station (WNTH, 88.1 FM).[citation needed] By 1970 New Trier was home to the nation’s first public high school-based CCTV instructional station, ITV, which broadcast educational programming to township elementary schools via microwave signals.[citation needed] Students operated WNTH under a faculty advisor, ITV was operated by students under professional television technical and programming staff.[citation needed]
By 1962, student enrollment was more than 4,000.[citation needed] Some 20 “temporary” trailer classrooms lined the rear of the building, which had been designed for 3,000.[citation needed] To accommodate the growing baby boom student body, voters approved a referendum for New Trier to purchase forty-six acres in Northfield.[citation needed] Chicago architecture firm Perkins and Will was selected to design a campus of curricular buildings clustered around a central library and administration building.[citation needed] The resulting modernist design was widely noted in secondary education architecture literature and practice, and emulated by Winnetka’s Carleton Washburne junior high school several years later.[citation needed]
“New Trier West” opened to freshmen and sophomores in 1965.[citation needed] What had been “New Trier,” at 385 Winnetka Avenue in Winnetka, became “New Trier East.”[citation needed] In 1967, New Trier West was dedicated as a separate four-year high school.[citation needed] U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner keynoted the dedication, which was also attended by U.S. Senator Charles Percy (’37), and Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (’50).[citation needed]
Enrollment reached an all-time peak of 6,558 students in 1972.[citation needed] By 1981, enrollment had dropped significantly. As a result, the school board decided to combine the East and West schools and convert New Trier West into the freshman-only campus.[citation needed] The division of freshmen (at the former New Trier West) from upperclassmen (at the former New Trier East) lasted from September 1981 until June 1985.[citation needed] By then enrollment had declined enough for the board to bring all students under one roof, close the former New Trier West, and convert the Northfield campus into a community recreation space.[citation needed] The campus later housed a senior center, corporate dormitories, a public swimming pool, and an alternative high school program known as West Center Academy.[citation needed]
Jonathan Kozol wrote a book called Savage Inequalities in 1991 that discussed the harsh conditions in the poorest school districts in the United States, making a correlation between inequality and racial separation and segregation.[citation needed] In the book, Kozol contrasted New Trier High School’s spending per student to impoverished schools within Chicago.[citation needed]
New Trier was featured in the December 9, 1996, issue of Time in an article entitled “High Times at New Trier High.”[citation needed] Among other claims, the article stated that “New Trier kids who smoke pot” were “by all accounts more than three-fifths of the student body,” compared with national averages at the time closer to 33%.[12] However, on the school’s WNTH’s radio program, the writer acknowledged that the “three-fifths” claim had been inadvertently rewritten during the editing process in such a way that seemed to imply that more than 60% of New Trier students may be regular users of marijuana, whereas that figure should have been clearly labeled as the portion of students who had ever used marijuana, including many who had used it only once or twice.[citation needed]
In 2001, due to increasing enrollment, the Northfield campus reopened.[citation needed] The decision to make it a freshman-only campus was a compromise from a stalemate between plans to either increase capacity at the Winnetka campus or reopen the Northfield campus as a separate school.[citation needed] The Northfield campus also houses the administrative offices of the New Trier Township High School District.[citation needed]
In February 2008, a student broke into the school computer database, using his personal computer to obtain unauthorized access to the network. He took a faculty member’s password and gained access to the student information system, obtaining grades for the then-current and last three graduating classes. The student also obtained ACT test scores for the class of 2008. The administration took disciplinary action against the student and he was later arrested by Winnetka police.[13]
In the summer of 2008, Illinois state senator James Meeks made a public plea for parents of Chicago public school students to assist their children in skipping the first day of school (September 2), and instead attend a protest at New Trier that involved attempting to mass enroll students there. The protest was over inequities in school funding between schools in Chicago and New Trier. New Trier administrators were supportive of the protest.[14][15] Students were greeted by cheerful parent volunteers to register at the Northfield Campus. After a relatively quick and peaceful registration, the buses left.